Saturday, 22 November 2014

It is now almost four years since I last posted on the Franco-German artist, Paul Leschhorn. Since then, quite a few new images of his colour woodcuts have been made available online and it's always good to see more of this still rather neglected printmaker's work. So, that is the first reason for another post.

Secondly, the work of the British photographer, James Ravilious, featured in the last post, made me think over the way Leschhorn used snow in his work. He was the snowiest of all the pre-war printmakers; just like James Ravilious, he gives us the feel of snow. It was not just a matter of using snow to provide areas of white (as it was with quite a few of his contemporaries); Leschhorn was also a skier and mountaineer who knew the Vosges Mountains well. Yet his work showed some of the most unidentifiable places in by any of the German-speaking printmakers.

Both artists also suffered considerably as a result of war. The plane that James Ravolious' father, Eric, was in was lost over the Atlantic near Iceland when James was only two years old, whilst the Alsatian countryside and mountains where Leschhorn grew up became a part of France again after its loss to Germany following the Franco-Prussian war. Snow allowed them both to build things up again from nothing, the way many other artists do, but in their own special and peculiar way.

What I said in the previous post was there were many kinds of borders, many f them subtle, unacknowledged borders lost to the modern world but still affecting the way we act. I think the Vosges was one of them, much more than the Rhein and while not all Leschhorn's prints have the feeling of remoteness, these are the ones that I prefer.

But even then, there are differences between them. For all their apparent similarities, Leshchhorn distinguished with care between one type of countryside and another and I think it's interesting that the closer he seems to get to regular human life, the more conventional he seemed to become. But then, I still don't know enough about the artist and his work to make very definite judgments about it.

But the one thing I do like about the work of both Ravilious and Leschhorn is the way they take the photographic print and the woodcut back to their basics of black-and-white. It's paradoxical that the more monochrome they become, the more feeling enters into their work. It is the way they use shape that is so particular, both stark and blurred and, of course, it is snow that allows them to do that, to lose, freeze and to recover, all at one and the same moment.

Friday, 31 October 2014

When Seamus Heaney was about to describe his potato seed-cutters, he invoked Breughel, saying, 'You'll know them if I can get them true'. I lived in Devon at the time James Ravilious took these photographs of north Devon farmers working with their sheep and dogs during a blizzard. I remember my own road being full of snow and I think Ravilious got his farmers true.

Ravilious is one of those artists who start people off talking about Englishness as though he were expressing some peculiar quality about us. What I like about these photographs is the way he could put all that behind him while he was working alongside these men. The harsh conditions provided him with the best opportunity he had to show that he could do more than just show how people lived in rural England.

The snow provided large areas of white but alongside them he has a tremendous range of tones. It's one of those paradoxical things about monochrome - in the right hands, it can be used to get the feel of things of themselves. In the 1920s Arthur Rigden Read was masterly in the way he got the sense of silk or sacking or feathers by using what was more or less black-and-white. Being a photographer Ravilious could work directly with the light to render those extraordinary armfuls of hay. These photographs are not about who we are, they are about what we are.

The Beaford Archive hold all the negatives for the photographs taken between 1972 and 1989 and all of them can be viewed online. All I have done here is to look at one aspect of his work, but I think there is something profound about the ones here. His father, Eric, never achieved anything like this. James found a way of retrieving something, much the way his farmers did.

The photographs are a record of events and of a way of life and he never lost touch with very ordinary things, but some of these also go well beyond that. You can see the sense of rhythm he achieved (especially in the photograph above) and the way he could build on it, and sometimes get somewhere very unusual. There are political borders and real borders, often within countries themselves. Modern life doesn't recognise such things by and large but Devon is a borderland and I think Ravilious picked that up.

Thursday, 30 October 2014

The next two posts will be about the British photographer, James Ravilious, who did the work he is best known for in north Devon and the Franco-German printmaker, Paul Leschhorn, who often depicted the Vosges Mountains in France under a heavy cover of snow.

Ravilious didn't have the great interest in snowy mountains and forests that Leschhorn had but I think he did some of his most compelling work when showing the winter conditions that Devon farmers worked in when looking after their sheep. But really what these two posts are about is this: black and white, even for artists who work in colour, is a sort of weather for them, basic and unavoidable.

Tuesday, 28 October 2014

Following the recent sale of Eric Slater's well-known The coastguard station (below)for £720, we now have A Sussex Mill (above) with a starting-bid of £250 from the same seller. Time was (and it was not so long ago) Slaters sold for £250. Not any more. Readers with an interest in Slater will have noticed that some prints have fetched a lot more - if I remember rightly one went not so long ago for around £1200.

The print on offer varies quite a lot from the version in James Trollope's book, Slater's Sussex. Generally, I think it's livelier and presumably Slater felt the same way about it. The blues are brighter and there is more green so the contrasts are greater but that only increases the colour-by-numbers effect that Slater undoubtedly has. They have period charm, yes. Are they worth £750? Most certainly not. Why are people prepared to pay so much? I really have no idea.

The prints certainly appear to be in good condition and how many are left to come out on the market is anybody's guess. The woodcuts with an edition given in the book are in 50s and so it surprises me they keep on turning up. I also wonder what will happen if something rare is being held back in reserve because I am quite certain that a market is being created here for those who seem willing to pay.

Saturday, 25 October 2014

I never appreciated just how good Edna Boies Hopkins was until the postman handed over a book about her this morning. It says a lot about the kind of images we see online to start with and the way they don't always do an artist' work justice. An exception would be the old post on 'Japonisme' but in Dominique Vasseur's book, print after print holds its own, and it was worth every penny, nickel and cent.

She is one of the few artists I find hard to decide which images to choose (when I have a choice). She was not just prolific, she was consistent. I may not like everything she did quite as much but nothing gets the thumbs down, which is saying quite a lot.

But here is what they call a personal selection. It's heavy on the famous flower prints but those are the ones I like most. From the more obvious Japanese imbued ones of her early years to the art deco images of the twenties, I think they are all like her, terrific.

Less was obviously more with Hopkins. What she was doing was essentially simple but done with great style and imagination. She was one of the generation of American artists who spent a lot of time in Paris as well as training with Arthur Wesley Dow and in Japan and it's that wealth of backgrounds that show up so well in all the prints here. She is full of nuance, like a spring day.

She spent ten years in Paris between 1904 and 1914 then with war looking imminent, he got a job teaching in Cincinnati and they moved back home. But Cincinatti didn't hold her and independent woman that she was, she taught in New York and set up with printmakers like Blanche Lazell in Provincetown and from 1915 began to use what's been called the white-line method.

I'm not going to go into details, partly because it doesn't appeal to me so much and partly because I just think it gave many of the prints a fake modernity and for Boies Hopkins something was lost in the mix. B.J.O. Nordfeldt was one of the artists to take this method to its logical extreme but I'm not convinced by a lot of his work anyway. But Boies Hopkins is another matter.

Saturday, 18 October 2014

I've heard today from a reader in Germany who recently bought a proof of Hans Neumann's woodcut Neuschnee. It differs quite a lot from the one I used to illustrate the recent post on Neumann's work. To start with, unlike my own, it is signed (but then mine has a strange fine scratch on it). More importantly, it is inscribed sonderdruck. I think this means it is from a fine edition and was printed using a water-based medium rather than printer's ink. As you can see, the tone is different and my reader says the blue is stronger than in the photograph he sent.

You will also notice that the paper is wrinkled (below) where the block was printed and that it is cockled at the top. Generally, this suggests a woodcut has been printed on japan although I have seen nothing more of my reader's print than you have. Mine is on a stiffer, laid paper which is pale beige. I also need to say the second image does have a keyblock border but it was missed off the image I found. You will also see that in close-up the finer image is stippled while the brown image is not. I would certainly think the change of colour is intentional. It makes the difference between the two images obvious and would possibly encourage collectors to buy both. I know that given the chance, I would.

Many thanks to Markus in Germany for sending in the image. I suspected there was something odd about this print and know we all know.

Tuesday, 14 October 2014

Anyone who sets out to produce a small book about the British artist, author and educationalist, Allen Seaby, will be faced with a large predicament: what to make of it all, the bird illustrations, the pony stories, the colour woodcuts, the art history, the ornithology, the animal carvings? He died in 1953 but was essentially a late Victorian, erudite, thorough, encyclopaedic and are any of us a match for that?

Martin Andrews and Robert Gillmor have sensibly shared the task. This was the option taken for recent books about Lucien Pissarro (2011) and Walter Phillips (2013). The specialist can deal with history and technique while a descendant of the artist can write a memoir and appreciation, as happened with Phillips. In Robert Gillmor, Seaby is fortunate enough to have a grandson who is also a distinguished linocut artist and writer and who has already given talks about the life and work of his grandfather. The task of writing about British colour woodcut given to Martin Andrews was in many ways far more complex. The history of the subject, and the part that Seaby played in it, has not so far been written and nor, as it turns out, was this the occasion to do so.

There is a good deal to admire here. The first part of the book takes the scrap-book approach, giving a strong flavour of the varied life that Seaby led and the final section takes an all-round approach to Seaby's work as an artist. To readers of this blog, much of this will be new. Illustrations from his sketch-books are very rewarding. Personally, I would have liked to have seen more of them and fewer of the later work on linen. The watercolour sketches takes us back to the days of John Ruskin, William Holman Hunt and Edward Lear, with Seaby himself achieving the balance of description and form his work is noted for. Unfortunately, the key document that shows just how he developed his approach is missing from the book. It is certainly all helped by the high standard of reproduction and the scanned images you see here are unworthy of the book but the best I could do.

This is not a book about Seaby's colour prints and producing a scholarly catalogue, useful as it would be, would have been a long and very difficult task. High standards have recently set by James Trollope for Eric Slater (2012), Timothy Dickson for Leonard Beaumont (2013) and most remarkably Robert Meyrick for Sydney Lee (2013). Seaby produced more prints than any of them, around 100 full-size colour woodcuts over his long career, many without titles, and none that I can think of with dates. Yet a check-list for many of his woodcuts, with titles and dates, has been in existence for many years (and I have a copy) and what mars this book are the mistakes with both dates and titles that could have been avoided. Unaccountably, the authors also give descriptive ie invented titles without placing them in brackets to make clear the titles are unknown. So, Twins (1936) becomes 'Goats and kids' early 1930s, Tutankhamen's burial place (1925) becomes 'Valley of the Kings' Egypt, early 1920s, Rotherfield Mill, Sussex (1935) is relocated to Brill in Oxfordshire during the 1940s, and what must be Black, white and grey (1936), showing a hutchful of rabbits, becomes the delightful 'Happy family'!

I could go on but should now deal with the tricky topic of early colour woodcut in Britain. No one should approach this minefield without considerable preparation and absolute caution. Robert Meyrick did a concise and informed job as part of his essay on Sydney Lee (and there was perhaps only one mistake) and James Trollope, not being a specialist, wisely left his remarks about colour woodcut to the final section. What made Martin Andrews attempt the write a five page summary of 'The colour woodcut movement' and where did the material come from? There are no notes, and I wonder how any of this will strike readers new to the subject. 'Artist and teacher' and 'The colour woodcut movement' are riddled with errors and what I can only take to be assumptions.

It would be easy (and unkind) to go through everything, but I was bemused to learn for instance that John Dickson Batten was studying at Reading School of Art in 1876 (and perhaps he was) when he was still at Amersham Hall School, but then the notes are lacking. But the worst is reserved for Walter Crane who is made to give up an important post as principal of the Royal College of Art to take up a part-time position as director of an art department at a provincial extension college of Christchurch, Oxford. Crane left Reading for the Royal College when it was set up in 1898 and, frankly, it would have been sensible to have left Reading and the Royal College well alone. Suffice to say, more research was needed, or a lighter touch. It wouldn't have broken the bank if the history had been left to another day. Or to someone else.

Allen W Seaby, art and nature is published by Two Rivers Press at £12.99 and is available directly from them.

Saturday, 4 October 2014

The Otto of the title is Otto Eckmann, the German painter who sold off all his paintings in 1894 and worked solely as an applied artist after that. It was a radical move true to a radical era. By the following year he was contributing graphic work to the brand-new Berlin periodical Pan. (The first edition had an advert for Samuel Bing's L'Art Nouveau exhibition in Paris.) He then began working for the Munich periodical Jugend when that opened in 1896.

Neumann was the son of the artist and teacher, Emil Neumann, and while his brother, Ernst, had gone down to Munich to study at the Academy, Hans had remained in Berlin to study under his father. It was by way of Ernest that he came to know Eckmann. Although Pan had used both etching and lithography as well as some colour woodcut to illustrate the magazine, Eckmann encouraged both brothers to make use of woodcut. 'Concentrate on woodcuts,' he told Hans in 1901. 'The woodcut technique... is forcing you to concentrate on the essentials.' (Die Technik des Holzschnittes zwingt Dich unweigerlich dazu, Deinen stilistischen Ausdruck auf das Wesentlichste zu konzentrieren.) It was good advice. Eckmann could see that Neumann was simplifying the technique in a modern radical way. Eckmann took a broad approach but made heavier use of Japanese art, including the keyblock used by the ukiyo-e printmakers. From the start, Neumann used the keyblock with caution and very often not at all, as you can see from his borzoi.

But perhaps there was also more to Neumann's Wesentlichste than only woodcut. I think there was a greater crossover between modern creative lithography, with its use of texture and bold shape, and innovation in modern woodcut. At least one of Neumann's early prints is described as a litho-woodcut (and I'm not sure what that means) while Sonnenschein is as casual as a photograph. Neumann was looking beyond Japanese colour woodcut at other techniques being used around him. What was attractive about woodcut was the simple fact that he could print them himself and did not have to rely on a printer or his press. It helps explain his early use of that commonplace of German printmaking, hand druck. It is the dullness of the red and the stippled printing of the second borzoi that gives the game away. It may be as abrupt and selective as a Japanese print but it is modern in a way that almost no woodcuts using the Japanese method ever are.

Neumann was not a purist; unlike Carl Thiemann, there is never any great sense of the medium being used and when he does occasionally go in for conventional cutting, as he did in Canale Grande, it looks like a Thiemann. A later print like Neuschnee is unmistakeably a woodcut but I wouldn't say it was altogether typical. Also, unlike a lot of the prints he made, Neumann didn't make use of a watercolour medium to print with. He obtained the greater clarity you see here by using printer's ink. (I know that because I am fortunate enough to own this print).

So, did Eckmann really have a legacy as Neumann said he did, what he called Ottos Vermaechtnis. Well, if you look at the way Neumann handles the meandering shapes made by the larger pine trees or compare Eckmann's crab from Jugend with Neumann's Rabe im Landeanflug, I think the answer is, yes, he did. The point is Eckmann died from tuberculosis the year after he gave his fellow-artist the advice, so it perhaps gave the remarks greater valedictory force.

What we also have to remember is just how early some of these images are compared to many modern colour woodcuts and yet they appear contemporary with artists like Thiemann or Hans Frank who in fact were working later. The real legacy lies here; there was a decisiveness about Eckmann, he was ill but got on with things, and he gave Neumann a simplified, directional force that comes across the first time you see his work. I was lucky to see some of his best prints first, prints which are still not available online (and I have tried scanning them but it weakens them and it would be wrong to do Neumann such an injustice).

I could say more (and probably will). It can take hours to uncover new images hidden in little corners of the net. Nor do I think the scope of the images that are easily available online always do Neumann the justice he deserves. The delicacy he achieved, especially in his later work, is not always something a pc monitor screen is good at. Beyond that, his sense of scale is also missing. Nothing beats seeing the print in front of you, particularly with an artist like Neumann who relies so much on tone, and Eckmann's advice to you would be, 'Buy them when you can.'

Thursday, 25 September 2014

To add to the list of early C20th British colour print artists with new exhibitions and books, we now have the most deserving so far. Following Sydney Lee, Eric Slater and Leonard Beaumont, an exhibition of Seaby's work opens at Reading Museum on 11th October, 2014, and runs until 22nd March, 2015. So, you have ample warning and plenty of time to go.

This is far from being his first solo exhibition at Reading (where he taught for many years) but I am not going to give away details here. The museum hold a good collection of Seaby's colour woodcuts and gouaches and no one should assume that only colour prints will go on show. It will be very interesting to see what they do exhibit. Seaby was an indifferent painter; not only that, his colour woodcuts over a very long career were uneven and not everything was as sublime as Heron, a print made when I think he was at his best around 1905 to 1910. But I don't want to prejudge a show, which most people with a serious interest in colour woodcut will want to see.

As part of this concerted push on Seaby , there is a book, to be published in mid October (the publication is delayed) and written by Martin Andrews with the help of Seaby's grandson, the linocut artist, Robert Gillmor. I've not had my copy yet but Andrews did a meticulous job on Robert Gibbings some years ago and I know that Robert Gillmor has long wanted his grandfather's work to gain the recognition it deserves. I will be posting a review just as soon as I've read it. In the mean time, if you can't wait, you can buy a copy online from Two Rivers Press at £12.99 plus postage. It has 76 pages, they will send it anywhere and they aren't expensive, but you will need a PayPal account to buy it from their website.

Take my advice and buy your Seabys now. You certainty won't be able to afford him after all this.

Wednesday, 24 September 2014

Time was there was so little work by Julia Mavrogordato available online, it was hard to tell what kind of an artist she was or even how many linocuts she had made. This situation wasn't really helped by people such as myself posting bird images from the menu cards she made for the Orient shipping line in the 1930s. They are interesting, of course, but are no more than machine-printed designs.

Since then things have improved, though not that much. One or two more linocuts have appeared, the odd oil or watercolour and, yes, yet more menu card designs, which continue to skew the picture we have of her. But then what do we know? Unless you are a rather smug curator in Christchurch, New Zealand, sitting on a file of material, including information you've had from mere bloggers, there isn't a lot to say. She was a member of the United Kingdom branch of an old Ottoman Greek family, was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and was good enough at linocut to be asked to exhibit with the British linocut exhibitions organised by Claude Flight. So, it isn't much.

As you see from Summer sailing (top) like most other British linocutters (but not all) she printed by hand using printer's ink. This was how she achieved the uneven, atmospheric printing that were so typical of linocut in the twenties and thirties and that we all like so much. It also accounts for the famous smudged margins that we now associate especially with Claude Flight's students at the Grosvenor School. But the images we have are not quite so standard. I think all the ones I know depict animals or birds and also that, one way or another, that show the kind of pursuits that were popular with wealthy people.

There is sailing, hunting, show-jumping, but there is also something more, not so much a sense of privilege as a directness and an earthiness and directness that suggests life. We can also see the way she handles light. The thin, wintry light of Gone to ground (third from top) is quite different from the bouncing reflected light of Summer sailing and much as I like Sybil Andrew's linocuts of rural life, Mavrogordato has something special. The hounds plunging into the bracken and swimming through it have more life in them than the pattern-making of the Grosvenor School would allow for. She was an intuitive but an educated one.

The textures she achieves, the distinctive scratchings and criss-crossing of the surface of the lino doesn't really come across that well on the menu cards but even on a computer image, the variety of tones she achieved with limited colours is obvious, and the impact of her shapes and the fluidity is really quite remarkable. What I am saying is we need to see her as an artist working in linocut (and using it exceptionally well for all her primitive feeling) and not simply as another stylised linocut artist. Otherwise we miss the point of those excited, snuffling hounds and searching spotlights.

Tuesday, 16 September 2014

I would like to say that I have here an example of the work in stained glass by the British designer Charles Paine. Unfortunately, this fetching little bird is the work of John Platt (at All Saints, Leek) who was Head of Applied Art at Edinburgh when Paine was working there. There has been correspondences for some while now on my last post about the design work of Paine and it is typical of our ludicrous age that I have been unable to find any of Paine's stained glass to illustrate this post. Almost all you get is posters, ironic because I believe it was stained glass that he excelled in.

It is easy to forget how much colour woodcuts were seen as part of the Arts & Crafts movement at the time, but not only was John Platt involved in stained glass design before the first war (he learned the technique at the Royal College), Frank Morley Fletcher who was Director at Edinburgh was also a maker of stained glass and certainly worked with his students at Reading on a window there about 1905. Like Platt, Paine also attended the RCA, though a little later, and in the 1920s went to work as head of applied art under Fletcher at Santa Barbara. All of which tends to suggest to me that there is an unwritten story here that I do not have the time to research. Stained glass isn't fashionable in the way that posters and prints are, a shame if one only considers the vivacity and grace of Platt's work here.

Needless to say, if any reader knows of the whereabouts of any of Paine's work in stained glass, they should let me know and it might lead us somewhere.

Sunday, 7 September 2014

I am probably not doing myself any favours with a post like this but here goes, anyway. At the end of the first war, the Society of California Printmakers held their first annual international exhibition at Los Angeles. This soon excited interest in Britain, interest which only grew when the British began to do very well for themselves. For instance, John Platt received the gold medal for best overall print with his exemplary colour woodcut, The giant stride, at the third exhibition in 1922, success that finally led to the Canadian, Walter Phillips, saying in 1927, 'As usual British artists take the awards at this exhibition.' How did this come about? And were those winning British prints really better than their rivals' work?

I think the answer has to be yes. From the very start, the British had concentrated on skill and although it was a cleverness that Claude Flight sneered at, the committee at Los Angeles was clearly impressed by the level of technical skill displayed by the British artists. It was more than a matter of colour and expression. Platt had received a wide training, not only in the arts and crafts but to a lesser extent as an engineer and architect and all this showed up well in The Giant Stride. He was also canny (or fortunate) in his choice of subject. Giant strides had first become popular in the United States and the whole bravura episode on the beach must have had great appeal to Californians.

I don't know which other colour prints Platt was competing against in 1922 but by the time Arthur Rigden Read exhibited Carcassonne in 1926, he had two of the most illustrious of modern colour woodcut artists to contend with. Nevertheless, he came away with the gold and Gustave Baumann had to be content with the Storrow prize for best block print. Summer Clouds is a blissful evocation of art colony life in New Mexico but would have been no match for the imaginative and dynamic portraiture of John Platt. Now compare the simple life of hollyhocks and pueblo-living in the desert with Read's complex understanding of architecture and perspective. Yes, it was a self-conscious, prize winning piece, but it also had a history that helped it on its way and would not have been possible for Read to make without the great example of William Giles' Ponte Vecchio from 1908. It didn't matter whether it was Giles, Utamaro or Italian chiaraoscuro colour woodcuts, Read had a keen eye and knew a good thing when he saw one. The British had been trained to use the best examples from other cultures and from the past. It would have been as easy for Read to have taken the old walls of Winchelsea (where he was living by that time) as it was for Baumann to depict the pueblos at Santa Fe, but Read could do what Giles could also do; as the French critic Gabriel Mourey put it about Giles, Read could transpose his feelings and exalt and with Carcassonne that was what he did, and with more effect than Baumann.

Nor was Walter Phillips' Wylye Mill Bridge (1925) really in with a chance, for all its exquisite sensibility. Phillips liked to present himself as a pioneer and emphasised that he had never seen a Japanese colour woodcut when he made his first prints about 1916 and that he had approached colour woodcut with resourcefulness and determination like some logger in the wilderness. But Read had only begun to make colour woodcuts in 1922 yet only four years later, he was able to take a leading prize. So, how did that happen? I think it was because he was already steeped in printmaking and had been looking at Japanese ukiyo-e prints and other forms of printmaking since he was in his twenties. The kind of semi-abstraction made use of by both Baumann and Phillips had no appeal for Read. Read had a versatility when it came to both technique and subject matter that the Americans could only dream of. It was versatility based firmly on observation, both of life around him and the work of other artists, including Americans like John Singer Sargent.

Ironically, Phillips subject for the 1926 was a British one. Another artist to visit Britain was Ernest Watson who was awarded bronze for his linocut, Misty morning. In its own more conventional way, this is a fine piece and almost certainly doesn't come across as well on a pc screen as it would do in front of you. What it lacks in originality, it makes up for with overstatement. It is the most obviously period of all the five prints here and yet again has a strong abstract feel to it. Compare Allen Seaby's The trout which won the Storrow the following year. Seaby combined style with observation and original technique. For all his borrowings from Hokusai, he broke with convention as wholeheartedly as Read.

But the real irony rests on where this leaves us all now. You can try and find a Baumann or a Phillips for the same price as a Read or a Seaby today, but you will not succeed - not on the open market, at least. Of all these artists, Read is the most difficult to come by, despite the fact that his reputation was high in the twenties and thirties and people (and I include myself here) just do not see enough of his work to make an adequate judgement of what he could do. Seaby admired Phillips and owned three of his prints but they would now all cost a lot more than anything by Seaby. Does that mean that Read, Platt and Seaby were overvalued by American judges in the 1920s? Or does it mean that American and Canadian colour woodcut artists are over-priced today?